Tillie Olsen; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Powerful writer celebrated for the slenderness of her output
The Independent
10 January 2007
Michele Roberts
Tillie Olsen was an iconic American writer whose reputation
rests on a slender published output of just five stories,
collected in Tell Me a Riddle, and a novel, Yonnondio.
Readers who value quality over quantity admire her capacity
to pack short forms with intense meaning. Readers who
understand the constraints on the creative ambitions of
working-class women struggling to combine earning a living
with raising children salute her courage in speaking out
about those obstacles.
In Silences, published in 1978, a collaged text assembled
from a lecture given at Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard), Olsen noted that
the women writers who had got into the male-dominated canon
were middle-class and usually childless. Olsen's work is
characterised by its passionate depiction of women's lives,
hardships and conflicts, its forging of a narrative voice
speaking in a poetic and often angry vernacular, its head-on
confrontation with the bruising effects of poverty on the
psyche.
She eventually became famous as much for the biographical
facts of her life as for her books. Her personal story
turned into the over-arching story of female oppression.
Olsen, having felt silenced as a writer for much of her
life, paradoxically ended up being turned into a sort of
saint of silence, revered for embodying exactly the
condition she deprecated. She is sometimes criticised, and
even derided, by scholars who think she made an entire
career out of writer's block, fooling the academics who
pitied her, invited her to teach, and got her grants and
prizes. Others simply suggest that her perfectionism, and
her political activism, as much as her work as a mother of
four children, got in the way of her writing.
She sprang from a highly political background. Born in 1912
(or perhaps 1913 - her birth certificate got lost) on a
tenant farm in Nebraska, Tillie was the second of six
children produced by Samuel and Ida Lerner, Jewish
immigrants who had fled Russia after participating in the
abortive 1905 revolution. Her father, who worked as a
painter and decorator, became the state secretary of the
Nebraska Socialist Party.
Revolutionary and socialist journals, rather than novels,
were the family's chosen reading matter, but Tillie Lerner
was fed literature by one of her teachers. She stood out
because of her poverty and her Jewishness: she smelled of
the garlic in her mother's chicken-feet soup, wore
hand-me-down clothes and wiped her nose on her sleeve
because she had no handkerchief.
After high school, Lerner worked at a variety of jobs,
variously housemaid, waitress, hotel maid, packing-house
worker, secretary, tie-presser and factory worker. Aged 18,
she joined the Young Communist League and was sent to the
Communist Party school in Kansas City. Caught distributing
leaflets to packing-house workers, she was put in jail for a
month. This experience, which included being beaten up by
another inmate, and contracting pleurisy, further
radicalised her.
Aged 19, Lerner gave birth to her first daughter, Karla, and
began to write her novel Yonnondio. The Partisan Review
published the opening part of this in 1934, as a short story
called "The Iron Throat", which received instant acclaim.
One reviewer, Robert Cantwell, called it "a work of early
genius" and it was named the best of 200 stories published
in 50 literary magazines that year.
In 1936, having moved to San Francisco with Karla, Tillie
Lerner met Jack Olsen, a longshoreman and union organiser.
They married in 1944 and had three daughters, Julie,
Katherine Jo and Laurie. Tillie Olsen ceased writing, all
her time taken up by motherhood, earning a living,
trade-union organising, and the sheer struggle to survive
the Depression. She snatched moments for writing while on
the bus going to work, or at night while the children slept.
Much of her writing had to happen in her head rather than
getting put down on paper. The oral working-class tradition
that let people generously give their tales to each other
obviously nourished her as a storyteller but material
circumstances did not allow her to translate these on to the
page.
In 1953, when her youngest child began going to school,
Olsen enrolled in a writing course at San Francisco
University. This allowed her to take her writing seriously.
In 1955 she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in
creative writing at Stanford University, which gave her
eight months of paid writing time. She wrote two stories:
"Hey Sailor, What Ship?", about a seaman going ashore for
riotous times; and "Oh Yes", about a black girl and a white
girl trying to make friends as they enter junior high
school.
Both these stories were included in the collection Tell Me a
Riddle, published in 1961. The eponymous story is perhaps
Olsen's finest piece of work. A 50-page novella, of
novel-like depth and reach, it is both love-song and lament,
both cry of pain and rage and haunting evocation of lifelong
struggle. Eva, married for 47 years to David, has been
diagnosed with terminal cancer. David takes her to visit
their children for one last time. Eva refuses to hold her
new grandchild. To another, who asks her for riddles, she
says she knows none. She retreats into herself, refusing to
comfort her grieving family by being sweet and kind. At the
end, her husband holds her as she dies.
Olsen's narratives burst out, words that have been dammed up
for years. Charged with intensity and reproach, they speak
to a single person, to an uncaring world. In the fourth
short story in the collection, "I Stand Here Ironing", the
speaker's memories and thoughts race hotly and heavily back
and forth just as her iron does.
In 1974, Olsen finally finished and published her novel
Yonnondio, about a family oppressed by Depression-era
poverty. If Silences speaks to her sense of weakness, her
fiction attests to her great creative power.
Michčle Roberts
Tillie Lerner, writer: born Wahoo, Nebraska 14 January 1912;
married 1944 Jack Olsen (three daughters; and one previous
daughter); died Oakland, California 1 January 2007.
Hyfler/Rosner
>
> The Independent
> 10 January 2007
> Michele Roberts
>
> She stood out because of her poverty and her Jewishness:
> she smelled of the garlic in her mother's chicken-feet
> soup, wore hand-me-down clothes and wiped her nose on her
> sleeve because she had no handkerchief.
I really, really hope this description of "Jewishness"
originated with Tillie Olsen herself, because it's verging
on the offensive.